On Christmas Eve, Manuela Paris returns home to a seaside town near Rome. She has been absent for some time, ever since she left - still a girl - to be a soldier. With determination and sacrifice, Manuela laboriously built the life she dreamed of, until she became an army non-commissioned officer and platoon commander in an advanced base in the Afghan desert, responsible for the life and death of thirty men. But the bloody attack in which she was seriously wounded forces her into a very different and no less insidious war: against memories, disillusionment and pain, but also against the stereotypical role of woman and victim that society tries to impose on her. The meeting with the mysterious guest of the Hotel Bellavista, Mattia, a man apparently without a past and, like her, suspended in his own personal limbo of expectation and hope, is an opportunity to come to terms with his story. And to find that life is always worth living - because nobody, not even her, is what they seem.